Saturday, June 30, 2012

Dungeons & Dragons has been
around for 38 years. This is a LONG time. It’s older than me, almost all of my
friends, and some of their parents. It’s outlasted wars and whole political
administrations. It’s stayed fairly popular through media firestorms, scandals,
changing fads (anyone want to reminisce about 90’s fashion?) and a whole host
of cultural changes that have swept away hordes of other pop-cultural
milestones. It’s here to stay. But just as it is unusual in its tenacity, it
has its own set of problems. It’s true that most of these problems are common
to roleplaying games, but as D&D is by far the most popular and well-known
system these unique challenges are most strongly apparent among its dedicated
community.

Foremost
of these challenges is the concept of an “Edition War”. Every decade or so, TSR
(now incorporated into Wizards of the Coast, itself a subsidiary of Hasbro)
would revamp the ruleset, fixing a number of fans’ longstanding gripes with the
current rules, and invariably creating a new set of gripes once the fans had a
chance to kick the new rules for a while. This also had the happy-for-TSR side
effect of rendering a great deal of the books these gamers invested in
obsolete. As with any large group of people, audiences inevitably split when
faced with the possibility of change. Some groups chose to stick with the
system they’d grown comfortable with, while others would try the new version
and see if it worked better for them.

Remember
how I said D&D was a long-runner, lo a whole paragraph ago? Well, D&D
is officially on its 4th Edition, but by my count it’s at least had
11 revisions over the years. (And that doesn’t include 5th Edition,
in development as I write this!) That’s a LOT of disagreements. To this day
you’re likely to find people still running adventures and whole campaigns in
the old 1974 rules, for a variety of reasons. Each new edition has had to
balance the inevitable splitting of the fanbase that exists with drawing in new
players. The more the edition skewed toward courting one group, the more the
other shied away. Case in point: the transition from 3.5 edition to 4th.
(Hah! So even by the system’s own count there are at least 5!)

For the record, the D&D releases have been tied to the
following edition changes, in order:

·Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1977. Yes, I
know. There was a split in rules-heaviness.)

·D&D Basic Set 2nd Revision (1981)

·D&D Basic Set 3rd Revision (1983.
This was to be the last Basic set. The Basic Sets were discontinued after this
stopped selling well, the devs reasoning that there was no reason to split the
fanbase further. Predictably, the later editions split the fanbase even more.)

·AD&D 2nd Edition (1989)

·D&D Rules Cyclopedia (1991)

·D&D 3rd Edition (2000, also the
first edition published and developed by WotC rather than TSR, which was
acquired and discontinued in 1997)

·D&D 3.5 (2003. A more incremental update, a
far cry from the radical changes made before and since, and the most
significant base-breaker in D&D history, until…

·4th Edition, the (current) most
controversial RPG system on the planet. (2008) This was followed up in 2010
with the beginning of D&D 4E Essentials, which was part simplification and
part attempt to draw in older players who might have abandoned 4th edition
over the radical changes.

We’ll get into just WHY 4th was so controversial
in my next post in this series, which will compare it with and contrast it
against the edition that came before it.